“Without developing love, compassion, faith, joy, delight, rapture, we won’t get very far. There has to be a firm, quiet ground of positive emotion to our life all the time. This is well within our reach. It is the normal human state. There is nothing extraordinary, nothing even particularly spiritual about it. We just happen to have sunk below that level, at least for the time being. Thus the way of mettā is not only a path of ever-increasing positive emotion leading to Enlightenment. It is a guide to recovering our basic human inheritance of joy.”